Cities & The Sky

Those who arrive at Thekla can see little of the city, beyond the plank fences, the sackcloth screens, the scaffoldings, the metal armatures, the wooden catwlks hanging from ropes or supported by sawhorses, the ladders, the trestles. If you ask "Why is Thekla's construction taking such a long time?" the inhabitants continue hoisting sacks, lowering leaded strings, moving long brushes up and down, as they answer "So that it's destruction cannot begin." And if asked whether they fear that, once the scaffoldings are removed, the city may begin to crumble and fall to pieces, they add hastily, in a whisper, "Not only the city."

If, dissatisfied with the answers, someone puts his eye to a crack in a fence; he sees cranes pulling up other cranes, scaffoldings that embrace other scaffoldings, beams that prop up other beams. "What meaning does your construction have?" he asks. "What is the aim of a city under construction unless it is a city? Where is the plan you are following, the blueprint?"
"We will show it to you as soon as the working day is over; we cannot interrupt our work now," they answer.
Work stops at sunset. Darkness falls over the building site. The sky is filled with stars. "There is the blueprint," they say.

(words by Italo Calvino)

Shanghai # 2

Millions of people running to the city centre each morning, hold their breath for a moment, then the moment's gone and off they go again. Gigantic TV screens show goods to buy, if someone could just switch the channel there would be images of thousands of Buddhist monks being beaten by the army not so far away from here. Everything is alright. The typhoon has weakened and turned into a tropical storm and, apart from the heat and the moisture which is almost unbearable and the frenetic traffic, everything seems quite calm. Suited Caucasians pass by, bums and small time merchants block your way, cyclists cut you off in true Chinese fashion. The city regain control after a close escape from total disaster and as we walk towards The Bund between the skyscrapers and the sick yellow sky I wonder what would happen if! Had they authorities moved all 15 millions or so citizens into a safe place and the worst typhoon of the century had stroke viciously leaving nothing on its way, who would have cried for this place? Apart from the corporations, that is!

(photo by Kate)

Shanghai

There's this city, where nothing ever ends. It just goes on forever in circles, a labyrinth, not a cm of space wasted. The city is an example of human failure or people's lack of coherence and managing of space. Your neck hurts from trying to find the horizon, the end of the skyscrapers, the start of a storm, a dawn that is struggling to find the way out of the buildings. The Chinese obsession with the 'bad spirits' that can only walk on earth in a straight row gave way for the Western obsession with modernity whose monstrous architecture flooded the city worse than a tropical storm.
Yet, if you look close enough you can clearly see how nature, no matter how oppressed by concrete it is, always comes back and the Chinese mastery of creating harmony finds its way even on this nightmarish place. There are plants bursting along the highways, small - almost tropical - parks in the midst of the traffic, a garden that shuts out the noise and invites the visitor into a short oblivion from the anxiety that surrounds this puzzled place...